Charles Bukowski Quotes

My eyesight is not nearly as good. My hearing is probably going away. My memory is slipping too. But I'm still around.

It sucks getting old.

When you approach middle age, lots of stuff happens. Your body is aging, you're watching people around you get sick, you're watching people die, your mortality becomes very present at that point in your life.

Nobody ever said that growing old would be easy. Just having to hold the newspaper out in your forties and then hair growing out of unusual parts of your body in your fifties. It's tough on the ego.

I feel like an old boxer. The brain's gone, but I can still move around.

You know you're in your 40s when you've spent 48 hours trying to think of a word, and that word was 'hemorrhoids.'

The discovery of a grey hair when you are brushing out your whiskers of a morning—first fallen flake of the coming snows of age—is a disagreeable thing.... So are flying twinges of gout, shortness of breath on the hill-side, the fact that even the moderate use of your friend's wines at dinner upsets you. These things are disagreeable because they tell you that you are no longer young—that you have passed through youth, are now in middle age, and faring onward to the shadows in which, somewhere, a grave is hid.

It's not easy getting old, you know. Things become a lot less clear.

A man of forty today has nothing to worry him but falling hair, inability to button the top button, failing vision, shortness of breath, a tendency of the collar to shut off all breathing, trembling of the kidneys to whatever tune the orchestra is playing, and a general sense of giddiness when the matter of rent is brought up. Forty is Life's Golden Age.

The 40s are when you start trading your psychological problems for physical ones.

You know, as you get older, the first thing you lose is memory. It seems to be happening with me.

Life begins at 40 - but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.

The older we get, the swifter time seems to pass and the quicker memories seem to fade.

One problem with age is that patience begins to ebb.

First you forget names, then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down.

Age is an ugly thing, and it goes on getting worse.

Getting older is hard.

We know that our senses are subject to decay, that from our middle years they are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if we didn't know and didn't believe.

Everyone must accept that we will age and age is not always flattering.

You know I used to be a heartthrob, and now I'm a coronary.

It's obvious that my brain isn't what it used to be.

It doesn't seem like it's been 50 years. I don't even feel like I'm 50 years old yet, though I've had all these knee and back operations.

You get old, you slow down.

Old age has got to start creeping up on me one day soon, and frankly I'm very scared. I don't want to be old. I've always felt so young. And I want to stay that way.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.